as lovely as ever.
Both her parents were overjoyed, but they bade their servants keep the secret and not
tell the neighbours about it, in order to avoid gossip. So no one, except the close
relatives of the Chang family, ever knew of this strange happening.
Wang Chou and Ch' ienniang lived* on as husband and wife for over forty years
before they died.
It is perhaps well that the world is not completely explained and that there is some
room for this type of imagination. The proper use of imagination is to give beauty to
the world. For as in the moral life human intelligence is used to convert the world into
a place of contentment for human existence, so in the artistic life the gift of
imagination is used to cast over the commonplace workaday world a veil of beauty to
make it throb with our aesthetic enjoyment. In China, the art of living is one with the
arts of painting and poetry. As Li Liweng at the end of the seventeenth century
expressed it in a dramatic passage,
First we look at the hills in the painting.
Then we look at the painting in the hills.
Chapter Four
IDEALS OF LIFE
I. CHINESE HUMANISM
TO understand the Chinese ideal of life one must try to understand Chinese humanism. The term "humanism" is ambiguous. Chinese humanism, however, has a very definite
meaning. It implies, first a just conception of the ends of human life; secondly, a
complete devotion to these ends; and thirdly, the attainment of these ends by the spirit
of human reasonableness or the Doctrine of the Golden Mean, which may also be
called the Religion of Common Sense.
The question of the meaning of life has perplexed Western philosophers, and it has
never been solved 梟 aturally, when one starts out from the teleological point of view,
according to which all things, including mosquitoes and typhoid germs, are created
for the good of this cocksure humanity. As there is usually too much pain and misery
in this life to allow a perfect answer to satisfy man's pride, teleology is therefore
carried over to the next life, and this earthly life is then looked upon as a preparation
for the life hereafter, in conformity with the logic of Socrates, which looked upon a
ferocious wife as a natural provision for the training of the husband's character. This
way of dodging the horns of the dilemma sometimes gives peace of mind for a
moment, but then the eternal question, "What is the meaning of life?" comes back.
Others, like Nietzsche, take the bull by the horns, and refuse to assume that life must
have a mining and believe that progress is in a circle, and human achievements are a
savage dance, instead of a trip to the market. But still the question comes back
eternally, like the sea-waves lapping upon the shore: "What is the meaning of life?"
The Chinese humanists believe they have found the true end of life and arc conscious
of it. For the Chinese the end of life lies not in life after death, for the idea that we live
in order to die, as taught by Christianity, is incomprehensible; nor in Nirvana, for that
is too metaphysical; nor in the satisfaction of accomplishment, for that is too
vainglorious; nor yet in progress for progress' sake, for that is meaningless. The true
end, the Chinese have decided in a singularly clear manner, lies in the enjoyment of a
simple life, especially the family life, and in harmonious social relationships. The first
poem that a child learns in school runs:
While soft clouds by warm breezes are wafted in the morn,
Lured by flowers, past the river I roam on and on.
They' ll say, "Look at that old man on a spree!"
And know not that my spirit's on happiness borne.
That represents to the Chinese, not just a pleasant poetic mood but the summum
bonum of life. The Chinese ideal of life is drunk through with this sentiment. It is an
ideal of life that is neither particularly ambitious nor metaphysical, but nevertheless
immensely real. It is, I must say, a brilliantly simple ideal, so brilliantly simple that
only die matter-offact Chinese mind could have conceived it, and yet one often
wonders how the West could have failed to see that the meaning of life lies in the sane
and healthy enjoyment of it. The difference between China and the West seems to be
that the Westerners have a greater capacity for getting and making more things and a lesser ability to enjoy them, while the Chinese have a greater determination and
capacity to enjoy the few things they have. This trait, our concentration on earthly
happiness, is as much a result as a cause of the absence of religion. For if one cannot
believe in the life hereafter as the consummation of the present life, one is forced to
make the -most of this life before the farce is over. The absence of religion makes this
concentration possible.
From this a humanism has developed which frankly proclaims a man-centred universe,
and lays down the rule that the end of all knowledge is to serve human happiness. The
humanizing of knowledge is not an easy thing, for the moment man swerves, he is
carried away by his logic and becomes a tool of his own knowledge. Only by a sharp
and steadfast holding to the true end of human life as one sees it can humanism
maintain itself. Humanism occupies, for instance, a mean position between the
other-worldliness of religion and the materialism of the modern world. Buddhism may
have captured popular fancy in China, but against its influence the true Confucianist
was always inwardly resentful, for it was, in the eyes of humanism, only an escape
from life, or a negation of the truly human life.
On the other hand, the modern world, with its over-development of machinery, has
not taken time to ensure that man enjoys what he makes. The glorification of the
plumber in America has made the man forget that one can live a very happy life
without hot and cold running water, and that in France and Germany many men have
lived to comfortable old age and made important scientific discoveries and written
masterpieces with their water jug and old- fashioned basin. There needs to be a
religion which will transcribe Jesus* famous dictum about the Sabbath and constantly
preach that the machine is made for man and not man made for the machine. For after
all, the sum of all human wisdom and the problem of all human knowledge is how
man shall remain a man and how he shall best enjoy his life.
II. RELIGION
Nothing is more striking than the Chinese humanist devotion to the true end of life as
they conceive it, and the complete ignoring of all theological or metaphysical
phantasies extraneous to it. When our great humanist Confucius was asked about the
important question of death, his famous reply was, "Don't know life 梙 ow know
death?"1 An American Presbyterian minister once tried to drive home to me the
importance of the question of immortality by referring to the alleged astronomical
theory that the sun is gradually losing its energy and that perhaps, after millions of
years, life is sure to become extinct on this planet. "Do you not realize, therefore,"
asked the minister, "that after all, the question of immortality is important?" I told him
frankly I was unperturbed. If human life has yet half a million years, that is enough
for all practical purposes, and the rest is unnecessary metaphysical worry. That
anybody's soul should want to live for more than half a million years and not be perfectly content is a kind of preposterousness that an Oriental mind cannot
understand. The Presbyterian minister's worry is as characteristically Teutonic as my
unconcern is characteristically Chinese. The Chinese, therefore, make rather poor
Christian converts, and if they are to be converted they should all become Quakers,
for that is the only sort of Christianity that the Chinese can understand. Christianity as
a way of life can impress the Chinese, but Christian creeds and dogmas will be
crushed, not by a superior Confucian logic but by ordinary Confucian common sense.
Buddhism itself, when absorbed by the educated Chinese, became nothing but a
system of mental hygiene, which is the essence of Sung philosophy.
1 I am using pidgin English here in order to retain the terseness and force of the
original.
For a certain. hard-headedness characterizes the Chinese ideal of life. There may be
imagination in Chinese paintings and poetry, but there is no imagination in Chinese
ethics. Even in painting and poetry there is a sheer, whole-hearted, instinctive delight
in commonplace life, and imagination is used to throw a veil of charm and beauty
over this earthly life, rather than to escape from it. There is no doubt that the Chinese
are in love with life, in love with this earth, and will not forsake it for an invisible
heaven. They are in love with life, which is so sad and yet so beautiful, and in which
moments of happiness are so precious because they are so transient. They are in love
with life, with its kings and beggars, robbers and monks, funerals and weddings and
childbirths and sicknesses and glowing sunsets and rainy nights and feasting days and
wine-shop fracas.
It is these details of life upon which the Chinese novelists fondly and untiringly dwell,
details which are so real and human and significant because we humans are affected
by them. Was it a sultry afternoon when the whole household from mistress to
servants had gone to sleep and Taiyti, sitting behind the beaded screen, heard the
parrot calling the master's name? Was it a mid-autumn day, that memorable
midautumn day of a certain year, when all the sisters and Paoyii were gathered to
write poems and mix in light raillery and bantering laughter over the feast of crabs, in
a happiness so perfect that it could hardly last, like the full moon, as the Chinese
saying goes? Or was it a pair of innocent newlyweds on their first reunion on a
moonlit night, when they sat alone near a pond and prayed to the gods that their
married life might last till death, but dark clouds came over the moon, and in the
distance they heard a mysterious noise as if a wandering duck had splashed into the
water, pursued by a prowling fox, and the young wife shivered and ran up a high fever
the next day? Yes, life which is so poignantly beautiful is worth recording, down to its
lowliest details. It seems nothing of this earthly life can be too material or too vulgar
to enter literature. A characteristic of all Chinese novels is the incessant and
nevertiring enumeration of the names of dishes served at a family feast or a traveller's
supper at an inn, followed frequently by. stomach aches and trips to the vacant lot
which is the natural man's toilet. So the Chinese novelists write and so the Chinese men and women live, and it is a life too full to be occupied with thoughts of
immortality.
This realism and this attached-to-the-earth quality of the Chinese ideal of life has a
basis in Confucianism, which, unlike Christianity, is of the earth, earth-born. For
Jesus was a romanticist, Confucius a realist; Jesus was a mystic, Confucius a
positivist; Jesus was a humanitarian, Confucius a humanist. In these two personalities
we see typified the contrast between Hebrew religion and poetry and Chinese realism
and common sense. Confucianism, strictly speaking, was not a religion: it had certain
feelings toward life and the universe that bordered on the religious feeling, but it was
not a religion. There are such great souls in the world who cannot get interested in the
life hereafter or in the question of immortality or in the world of spirits in general.
That type of philosophy could never satisfy the Germanic races, and certainly not tie
Hebrews, but it satisfied the Chinese race 梚 n general. We shall see below how it
really never quite satisfied even the Chinese, and how that deficiency was made up
for by a Taoist or Buddhist supernaturalism. But this supernaturalism seems in China
to be separated in general from the question of the ideal of life: it represents rather the
spiritual by-plays and outlets that merely help to make life endurable.
So true was Confucianism to the humanist instinct that neither Confucius nor any of
his disciples was ever made a god, although many lesser literary and military figures
in Chinese history were duly canonized or deified. A common woman, who
suffered wrongs and faced death to uphold her chastity, might in an amazingly short
time become a popular local goddess, prayed to by all the villagers. Typical of the
humanist temperament is the fact that although idols were made of Kuan Yti, a brave
and loyal general in the time of the Three Kingdoms, idols were not made of
Confucius, nor of the ancestors in the halls of ancestral worship. Iconoclasts have
really nothing to do when they enter a Confucian temple. In the Confucian and
ancestral temples there are merely oblong wooden tablets, inscribed with characters
bearing the names of the spirits they represent, having as little resemblance to idols as
a calendar block. And in any case, these ancestral spirits are not gods, but merely
human beings who have departed but who continue to take an interest in their
